Chapter Sixteen
I AM GIVEN ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPH
I NEEDED TO think. Walking is best for that. Mindless chores that keep my hands occupied and my brain free to wander are second best. So when Maggie said that she wished she had time to pick the strawberries that grew wild at the back of her property, I volunteered. I grabbed a bucket, headed beyond the ornamental hedge that divided the lawn from the kitchen garden—Maggie grew all kinds of vegetables and herbs—and set to work. While I picked, I thought about everything I knew. I had filled two containers by the time Daniel’s head appeared above the hedge. He waved something at me. I straightened immediately.
“What have you got there?” I asked.
“Mr. Rollins gave it to me.” He came through the hedge and handed it to me. It was a framed photograph—an old one. The glass was cracked and the frame was chipped.
“It’s the Rooster.” I knew it immediately, even though there was no signage to confirm it. Mr. Rollins, younger but still recognizable, was seated at a piano, his head back, his face split by a wide grin. He was clearly enjoying himself. So were the people around him.
“That’s TJ.” Daniel pointed to a young black man standing near the piano.
“He’s really handsome.” He was tall and well built, with twinkling eyes.
“And that—” He pointed to a blond girl in a tight sweater and a full skirt that fell to mid-calf. She was wearing saddle shoes and ankle socks. “That’s Anne Morrison. She was Anne Tyson then.”
“You know her?”
He shook his head. “Mr. Rollins found the picture after we talked to him. He told me that girl used to come to the Rooster with her friends. Maybe she remembers Mr. LaSalle.”
I took another look at the photo. There were at least a dozen white kids in it, half of them girls.
“How come he remembers her?”
Daniel smiled.
“He says she was a good dancer. Really good. He says he’s pretty sure her mother would have packed her off to a convent school if she’d seen how that girl danced.”
She certainly had a wide grin on her face. And she was pretty.
“Do you know where she is now?”
“Mr. Rollins says she still lives in town.”
“Then she must be in the phone book.” I looked at the strawberries. Maggie wanted to make jam. She would need more berries than I had picked so far. “Come and help me. Then we’ll see if we can track down Anne.”
It took us just thirty minutes to fill every container I could find with plump, fragrant strawberries. Warm from the sun, they already smelled like the strawberry jam they were destined to become.
I started back to the house, but Daniel didn’t follow.
“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’ll wait here.”
I delivered the strawberries and thumbed through the phone book. It contained seven Morrisons, and I couldn’t help wondering if they were related to each other. I copied down all the addresses and took them out to Daniel, who was waiting at the hedge.
“Which one do you think might be her?” I showed him the list of addresses.
“This one is out of town a ways.” He pointed to the first name. “This one too. The other five are closer.”
I wished he could have narrowed it down even more. But five names were better than seven.
“Which is the closest one?”
He pointed.
“Show me.”
He hesitated but finally walked me down to the main street. Three men stood in front of the hardware store. One of them turned and looked at us as we passed on the other side of the street. I was positive that he had followed me home with the mob the other night. He nudged his buddies, and they turned to look too. I prayed they wouldn’t follow us and make trouble.
They stayed where they were. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Daniel came to a halt at an intersection.
“Go up to the first corner. That’s Mulberry. The first Morrison lives there.”
“You aren’t coming with me?”
“I’d rather wait over there.” He nodded to a bench across the street, in front of a small park.
I didn’t argue with him. I sort of knew how he felt. I’d always felt out of place when I ventured into Johnny’s neighborhood, where all the houses had neat lawns and shiny cars in the garage and toys strewn all over the driveway. Going there reminded me of all the things I didn’t have, like parents and siblings and a house and a room of my very own—things Johnny took for granted.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said.
The Mrs. Morrison who answered my knock at the first house was eighty if she was a day. She peered at me through glasses that were a quarter of an inch thick, and I had to practically shout so that she would hear me. Even then, I had to repeat everything, sometimes more than once. It turned out that the Anne Morrison I was looking for was her granddaughter-in-law and the fourth of the five in-town Morrisons on my list. I shouted my thanks and went to find Daniel.
He gave me directions to Anne Morrison’s house but refused to go with me. I promised to tell him what, if anything, I found out.
Anne Morrison was still a blond with salon-coiffed hair, but she was chubbier than in the photograph, and there were fine lines radiating out around her eyes and her mouth, which were made up with blue eye shadow and pink lipstick. She was wearing a cotton dress and white sandals; little pearl earrings dangled from her earlobes. She blinked at me when she opened the door and said, “Yes?” in a soft voice.
“Are you the Anne Morrison who used to be Anne Tyler?” I asked.
A frown deepened the lines on her forehead.
“Why do you ask?”
I showed her the photograph.
“Is this you?” I pointed to the slender blond.
At first Anne’s eyes stayed on me. She was probably wondering who this stranger at her door was. But eventually her gaze slipped down to the framed photo, and a smile transformed her face. In an instant, she looked like the exuberant girl she used to be.
“Where on earth did you get that?” She reached for the frame, then paused and said, “May I?” When I handed her the picture, she held it up for closer inspection. “Good heavens, I didn’t even know this existed.”
Anne’s expression was vague. She couldn’t make the connection.
“The man who used to play piano at the Rooster,” I said.
“Rolly?” She squealed like a schoolgirl. “Rolly had this?”
“He says you used to sneak down to the Rooster all the time.”
“So did this boy here.” Anne pointed to a lanky youth, his hair slicked back, black-framed glasses all but obscuring his eyes. “That’s Ronald. My husband. We met at the Rooster, although, believe me, we never told our parents. They would have had a fit if—” She broke off. Her smile faded. She fixed me with a sharp look. “I’m sorry, but who did you say you were?”
I told her that I was staying with Maggie. “The publisher of the local newspaper,” I added. If she inferred from what I said that I was a relative of Maggie’s or a houseguest, well, I didn’t disabuse her of the notion.
“I never get a chance to look at the newspaper,” she said. “The kids run me off my feet. I don’t have time to sit down for even a moment. I’d be chasing them around the property right now if Ronald’s mother hadn’t scooped them up an hour ago to take them to a movie. There’s a new Disney picture playing.” She raised the photo again and smiled at some secret memory.
“I was wondering,” I said. “Do you remember a man who used to go to the Rooster about the same time as you did? He was a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s.” I pointed him out to her.
“I didn’t really know any of those boys very well.”
“The man I mean was white. His name was Patrice LaSalle.”
Anne’s forehead scrunched up as she thought. “I don’t recall—” Her eyes popped. “Say, you don’t mean the man who was murdered? His name was Patrick, I think.”
“Patrice.”
“He had some kind of accent. He wasn’t from around here. I think he was from up north somewhere.”
“Canada,” I said.
“That sounds right. A good-looking fellow. Dark eyes, dark hair. A soft way of speaking. Never danced. I know. I must have asked him a dozen times. Didn’t talk much either. But he sure seemed to enjoy the music. His toe was always tapping.”
My heart raced. This woman remembered him. She’d noticed things about him that no one else had mentioned so far.
“I tell you, even though I was sweet on Ronald—we were pinned—there were times when I couldn’t take my eyes off that fellow. There was something about him. I can’t say exactly what it was, but there was something. All the girls tried to get him to dance. He’d just smile and shake his head and say he was too old for that sort of thing. And we all left it at that. We were sixteen, maybe seventeen.” She smiled again. “Ronald got us some phony IDs. That way the owner could pretend he thought we were legitimate.” The memory seemed to tickle her. “We were pretty wild back then. That friend of the Jefferson boy was, let me see, my God, he must have been twenty-three or twenty-four. An old man. At least, that’s what we thought at the time. Wouldn’t I love to be that age again!” She laughed.
“Do you remember seeing him outside of the Rooster? Do you have any idea if he made any friends here?”
“I don’t know much about him except that he was found in the river. They put that Jefferson boy in prison for it.”
I waited.
“We were all shocked,” she said. “Some girls cried when they heard, even though they didn’t know him very well. Just the idea that anyone could kill such a nice man—it seemed so awful. One of the girls, Ellie, had a breakdown over it. At least, that’s what people said.”
This was news. “A breakdown over the murder?”
“She was the worst for flirting with him. But he turned her down every time. After a while she stopped coming around.” She thought for a moment. “Hmmm,” she said.
“Hmmm?”
“I was just thinking—never mind. It’s not important.”
“I’m trying to get as much information as I can.”
Anne looked at me. “It’s just…Ellie stopped coming down to the Rooster. After that, it seemed like he wasn’t there as often either. It’s probably a coincidence. I mean, it’s not like I ever saw them together. But it’s kind of strange, now that I think of it.” She shrugged.
“Did you ever talk to Ellie about it?”
“No. She left town after it happened. The murder, I mean. I didn’t see her again for, I don’t know, it must have been a year. I ran into her on the street. She looked thin, that’s all I remember. We were never close friends, and she didn’t seem to recognize me, so…” Both shoulders rose in apology. “I never spoke to her again.”
“Is she still in town?” If Ellie had known Patrice LaSalle, I definitely wanted to talk to her.
“In a manner of speaking. She died. Years ago. She’s buried in Oak Grove.”
My spirits crashed. Another dead end. Now what?
“Was there anyone else who seemed especially interested in Mr. LaSalle?” I asked.
“Not that I recall.” Anne handed the photograph back to me. “I have a million things to do now that my little monsters are out with their grandma.”
“This girl Ellie,” I said before she closed the door on me. “Does she have family in town?”
“Oh my, yes. Her father is John Chisholm.”
“The John Chisholm who owns a lot of businesses around here?”
“The same. That’s why I didn’t know Ellie well. No one did. Her daddy sent her to private school up in Evansville. If you ask me, she would have been happier if he’d let her go to school with the rest of us. She would have had more friends, that’s for sure.”
She excused herself and disappeared inside.
I was on my way back to Maggie’s when someone called my name. It was Mr. Standish. He was coming out of the drugstore.
“I was just going to get a cold drink,” he said. “Care to join me?”
The man was still a mystery to me. He seemed to pop up everywhere. He knew a lot about the town and its people, and he seemed happy to share his knowledge. But there was something beneath his friendly exterior, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Still, he was a good source of information. I accepted his invitation.
We went to the diner, where he selected a booth far from the window. Mr. Standish ordered iced tea for both of us, and while we waited for it, we made small talk. After we’d been served, though, he leaned back against the upholstered booth and said, “What are you really doing here, Cady? Why are you so interested in Thomas Jefferson?”
I met his pale eyes. In most of our encounters, Mr. Standish had been friendly, like a kindly old uncle. But I wasn’t reading any uncle-like friendliness in his eyes now. There was a steely hue to the blue of his irises. Whatever he used to do before he retired, I was sure he had given it his full attention and had been successful at it. He had the air of a man of competence, someone who meant business and was businesslike in all his dealings. Someone who was used to people paying attention to him, doing what they were told and addressing him with respect.
“I already told you. I want to write about it.” I sipped my iced tea demurely through a straw.
“You’re stirring up trouble too, even though you told me you weren’t a troublemaker.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Mr. Standish waved me to silence.
“That group of yahoos following you. The fire at Maggie’s. Letting folks think you’re Lorne Beale’s granddaughter. It all adds up to trouble.”
That reminded me of something I wanted to know.
“You told me that Sheriff Beale and his daughter didn’t get along. What happened between them?”
Mr. Standish shook his head. “You’re not going to let it be, are you?”
He was right about that. “What happened?”
He sighed and drank some tea.
“I told you. Lorne’s wife left him, took the girl and went back to where she came from. A few years later, she died. After that, Jane—that’s the daughter’s name—lived with her mother’s people up in Connecticut. Lorne didn’t fight it. He figured she’d get a good education, which they were more than happy to pay for. She was up there all fall and winter. I don’t think she even came back for Christmas most years. But she’d make the trip most summers with a pocketbook full of money from her grandparents. She loved to party. Lorne didn’t approve, but he didn’t have much say in the matter. He’d more or less given that up when he agreed to let his wife’s relatives foot the bills for her. There used to be a place the kids liked to hang out. A roadhouse.”
The Rooster. I didn’t tell him that I knew about the place. I had already learned that different people looked differently at things and remembered them differently, and if you wanted to get a good picture of what had really happened, you had to keep your mouth shut and your ears open.
“Mostly it was a colored place,” Mr. Standish said. “There was music—not the kind that most parents thought was proper for their sons and daughters—and drinking. Who knows what else went on? Kids would sneak down there without their parents knowing. Well, without most parents knowing. But Lorne patrolled the place. He went in there regularly even though it was across the county line, because people around here complained about the noise and about seeing kids drive away from there at all hours. The first time he found Jane in that place, he was furious. He went in there to roust her out. Threatened to tell the other kids’ parents what they were up to too. Threatened to close the place down.”
He took a sip of his tea. “But that never happened.”
“Because he had no authority?” I asked. “Because it was out of his jurisdiction?”
“That wasn’t it. He could have done whatever he wanted and asked forgiveness afterward. He wouldn’t have had trouble getting it either. No, the problem was that he hadn’t bargained on Jane.”
“What do you mean?”
“The story is that after Lorne threatened her, Jane took him aside for a brief conversation. Apparently, she did most of the talking. When she was finished, Lorne walked out of the place. I don’t think he ever went back. I’m not even sure he kept the place on the patrol route.”
“What did she say to him?”
“That is the question, isn’t it? As far as I know, there are only two people who know the answer—Jane and Lorne. And neither one of them, to my knowledge, ever revealed the content of that particular conversation.”
“What do you think she said?”
“My guess—she probably told him that if he ever wanted to see her again, he’d better back off and let her have her fun. She came down again the next summer, and that was it. She never came back again. Maybe Lorne went up to Connecticut to visit her. If he did, he never told me about it. And, as I already told you, she didn’t invite her father to her wedding.”
“Does she know he’s in a nursing home?”
“I expect so. She still has a few friends down here. But she’s never visited him, to my knowledge. Neither has Lorne’s granddaughter. My guess is she’d be about your age. I know for a fact that Jane told Roger Whiteside—he’s a lawyer, does a lot of wills and estates work—that she doesn’t care what’s in his will; she has no interest in anything that belongs to her father. His house was sold. Most of his stuff was either auctioned off or given away. The money’s just sitting in a bank account somewhere. He’s got a hunting cabin in the woods. Nice piece of lake-side property. She’ll probably sell that too, if she hasn’t already, and the proceeds will go into the same bank account. Roger has to keep his own counsel. But his wife overheard a conversation between Jane and Roger. Says she couldn’t help overhearing it—it was more of a shouting match, really. Jane told Roger that when the time comes, she’s going to give what’s left of her father’s estate to the NAACP. You heard of them?”
They were in the newspaper a lot. They were a civil rights organization—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“She said that would be sure to make him turn over in his grave, and she liked the idea of that.” He shook his head. “No, sir. If you ask me, he never should have let Sally take that girl. It just turned her against him.”
I sipped the rest of my iced tea and wondered. Finally I asked, “Did you know Ellie Chisholm?”
The question seemed to hit him like a stray ball from left field.
“You mean John Chisholm’s daughter?”
I nodded.
“What about her?”
Mr. Standish’s eyes narrowed. “You ask a lot of questions, and I have no idea where some of them come from. What do you know about Ellie Chisholm?”
“I know she liked to go to the same roadhouse as Jane Beale.”
“So you already heard about the place.”
“I know that she went to a private school too. Were she and Jane friends?”
“They probably knew each other. But they didn’t go to the same school. Ellie stayed in state. What does Ellie have to do with this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
He shook his head. “Well, if you want to know anything about her, I’m afraid you’ll have to ask someone else. But good luck. John Chisholm is an important man around here. He employs a lot of people. He’s friendly enough, but he doesn’t like to get overly familiar with people. He also likes to keep his private life to himself.”
“I heard Ellie was awfully young when she died. Was she sick?”
“I heard it was an accident. I think she was away at school at the time. More than that, I don’t know.”
It didn’t surprise me. There seemed to be a lot of secrets in this town. It reminded me of Hope. On the one hand, most people knew most other people by sight and probably also knew where they worked, if they were married or had kids, if they spent too much time at the local beer hall or the bingo, how well or poorly they dressed their kids. On the other hand, people were guarded, especially about what went on in their own homes. That was their business and no one else’s. At least, that’s what they strove for. No one wanted to live in a glass house. No one wanted their whole life on display for others to comment on or gossip about. People wanted to feel that they could be themselves once they closed their front doors. They wanted to be able to give in to their secret desires and longings, no matter how sad or pathetic or shameful others might judge those to be.
I finished my drink and started to slide out of the booth.
Mr. Standish laid a hand over mine to stop me.
“I think it’s time for you to go back where you came from, young lady. I don’t think this is a good place for you.”
He was deadly serious. Was he warning me? Was he threatening me? What exactly was going on? For sure it had something to do with Thomas Jefferson. That’s what had brought me down here. It’s what had gotten me into trouble with that mob. It may have been behind the fire. I was definitely getting the message that people—some people anyway—didn’t want me looking into Mr. Jefferson’s past. It made me more determined to find out what was going on.
Maggie had left me a note. She was covering a council meeting in a nearby town and then had to attend a birthday party for a woman who was turning 102. She wouldn’t be back until suppertime. There was no one in the house, no guests other than Arthur, and I wasn’t sure about him because I hadn’t seen him in two days.
I went downstairs to the morgue. This time I made a beeline for the file cabinets and looked up Chisholm. There were two files. One was as fat as a New York City phone book—or, at least, how I imagined a New York City phone book would look. It was a file on John Chisholm. The second was slender—Chisholm, Ellie. The only thing inside that one was an obituary, written out by hand. Ellie Chisholm had been nineteen when she died suddenly. It listed her accomplishments—head of her class all through school, member of her school basketball team, an excellent gymnast, cello player, member of her school yearbook committee, member of the debate club, editor of her school newspaper. A girl of many accomplishments. But there was no mention of how she died. No mention, even, of the accident that Mr. Standish said took her life.
Maybe that meant something, and maybe it didn’t. I had nothing that tied Ellie Chisholm to Patrice LaSalle. She had flirted with him—all the girls had, according to Anne Morrison. Also according to Anne, Ellie had stopped going to the Rooster about the same time Patrice did. That could mean something, or it could mean nothing at all.
But suppose it meant something.
Suppose Ellie and Mr. LaSalle—Patrice—had stopped going to the Rooster at the same time because they wanted to be alone with each other. It was possible. But then, when you theorize without the benefit of any firm facts, almost anything is possible. The trick is finding out if it really happened. It was frustrating to think that Ellie Chisholm had known Patrice LaSalle better than most people but that it was impossible to ask her about him.
Unless…
Maybe she had confided in someone at home.
Maybe she had confided in her father.